Teacher Turnover in Local Public Pa. Districts

Among traditional public schools in the Philadelphia-area five-county region, Chester-Upland School District had the highest percentage of its teachers leave per year on average for the school years 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22, which was calculated by adding the percentage of teachers who went to another district with those who left teaching in a Pennsylvania public school altogether. While teacher turnover isn't a new problem, filling the additional vacancies created has become more difficult.

Note: This analysis by Ed Fuller, an associate professor in the education policy studies department at Pennsylvania State University, is based on educator employment data files available on the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) website. School districts submit to PDE information on their professional employees in October of each academic year. For the purpose of this analysis, all teacher data between the 2014-15 and 2021-22 academic years was included except for teachers who were listed as being employed by multiple districts in the same year -- likely long-term substitutes.

He calculated percentage “leave” by combining the percentage of teachers having moved districts (defined as a teacher who was employed in one Pa. public school in two consecutive years, but the employing district in the second year was different from the first) with the percentage having “quit” (defined as a teacher who was employed as a teacher in a Pa. public school in one year and then was not employed as a teacher in any Pa. public school in the next). Districts’ attrition rate is the percentage of all teachers in a district identified as a leaver.